Interview with David Sønstebø

Byteball vs IOTA-token.

[This article is outdated. A direct technical comparison between Byteball and IOTA is not meaningful anymore since the IOTA development accelerated fast.]

Hello everybody,

I hope you guys had a good start in 2017 as good as mine!

Today I’m going to show you some interesting facts about Byteball and IOTA.

Byteball and IOTA both, share an innovative new technology – the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Personally, I think that therefore both should be taken serious, depending on where you want to invest or be a part of!

Therefore, this article is not about “What is the better platform?” because there is simply no answer to that! But about “Where lies the field of application?”

Being in “Cryptoland” for a few years now, I know that hype is a proper and legit tool to advertise your investment and technology, especially when we are talking about new cutting edge technology which needs to

find investors and new developers to grow.

No wonder that twitter is exploding and no wonder, that we see lots and lots of misleading information.

Time to clean up the mess.

1. Who was first?

No one knows when the first idea of IOTA or Byteball came to the minds of David Sønstebø, Come-from-Beyond, Sergui Popov of IOTA and Anton Churyumov of Byteball.

The former are the first “CORE” founders of IOTA who bring excellent abilities and a lot of expertise. Since IOTA has grown a lot, CORE has grown with the addition of Dominik Schiener, Gianluigi Davassi and a few more experienced members of the IOTA-foundation.
Further info about new foundation-members can be found here: https://forum.iotatoken.com/t/current-revealed-foundation-members/1098

The latter, Anton Churyumov is well-known, a skilled scientist and developer in the scene -and the only developer of Byteball AFAIK.

Based on the announcements-threads on Bitcointalk and the date of the fully functioning main net of IOTA in July 2016, it is safe to say that the first DAG aka the Tangle was IOTA-token.

This doesn’t really give us more information about the intrinsic value of the tech itself but gives us an idea of what technology had more time to mature in terms of coding, testing and distribution. Especially when it comes to real-world adoption outside of Cryptoland. More about that in 4)

2. Technical differences and features

To underline the field of application of both technologies, this feature-table provides an easy comparison of the most important perks.

Features (simplified list)

Byteball

IOTA-token

Total amount

10 ^15 BYTE

not-inflationary

2.779.530.283.277.761 iota

not-inflationary, high number for countless devices in the future

Mainnet

25th December 2016

July 2016

Premine

1%

Zero premine

Transaction fees

Yes (1:1 BYTE per Byte Data)

no

POW/POS

No POS/POW. Instead a Mainchain (MC) for including tx.

POW while generating addresses and any tx.

Unique features

-Private asset: Blackbyte integrated for anonymous tx.

–quantum secure NTRU algorithm can be added in the future.

No tx-fees especially for the Internet of things.

-already quantum secure because hash-based Winternitz signatures.

Underlying tech

DAG and scalable

DAG and scalable, branch-able for small devices needed in the IoT.

Theoretical confirmation-time

~30s

Quasi-infinitesimal. More nodes: faster network.

3. Unique features

Apart from all advantages, a cryptocurrency can have, the underlying DAG is a big advantage both discussed technologies inherit.

This feature is kind of a preeminence in Cryptoland because traditional blockchains struggle with a lot of problems like scalability and speed with a growing amount of data.

-Byteball’s unique feature is without a doubt its integrated private asset, which allows conducting anonymous transactions with Blackbyte.

-IOTA’s unique feature is undoubtedly that no transaction-fees are taken. The only technology capable of functioning as the backbone of the Internet of Things on a global scale therefore is IOTA.

4. Real-world adoption and field of application

In my opinion, IOTA is still far away from “mass-adoption”, but also years ahead of Byteball. Months of negotiation and clever strategic management of the IOTA-CORE, especially David Sønstebø’s efforts and Dominik Schiener’s participations in meaningful IoT-conferences, lead to tons of collaborations and partnerings between IOTA and real companies.

The recently added foundation-members are the first glance at IOTA’s future, which is not stuck in Cryptoland, but located in real global businesses.

This is maybe the biggest winning margin IOTA has over Byteball at this moment, for speculators and developers.

The field of application is the most mentionable difference here.
Byteball is actively trying to replace existing currencies such as Bitcoin and, even if this sounds boastful: Dollar, Euro and all other FIAT-currencies, at least for the long run -like Bitcoin does.

IOTA can be used as such but has a completely different operational area: the IoT. The global network, where countless devices communicate with each other in domestic fields, in industrial appliances such as sensoring or M2M and for nano-payments where transactions-fees matter. Smart-contracts, smart-data, smart-cities are just a few examples of where IOTA can and will work.

5. Are Byteball and IOTA competitors?

To sum up: No. If Byteball would aim for being the IoT-ledger, one could conclude that IOTA is superior.
But Byteball’s field is set in currency-replacements, smart contracts, anonymous fast value-shifting.

→Byteball in fact, can do everything IOTA can do, except functioning as the backbone of the Internet of Things because transactions-fees would be counterproductive.

That being said: choose wisely where to invest, either in the IoT or in a currency-replacement with anonymous transactions. Both have their place.

34 Replies to “Byteball vs IOTA-token.”

We could say that both use tangles but with the difference that Iota is specialized for machine-to-machine use, while Byteball is specialized for human-to-human applications. They seem much complementary.

Hello, the network can be supported with spammers which help transactions to approve. These network spammers are either using CPU or GPU. The latter are much faster and able to conduct lots of tx per second.
When IOTA is beeing used in a global network and for industrial processes, JINN ternary processors are used to conduct ten-thousand tx/seconds. Since we have a great scalability, there is no speed limitation so that most transactions in the future are conducted in seconds. You can see a first picture of JINN here: http://www.tangleblog.com/2017/01/25/the-tech-behind-iota-explained/

let suppose 1000 transactions, a person does in a second, means he has to perform PoW for 2000 transaction ? doesn’t it require a lot of computing resources ? a normal machine will DOS itself in this way what i think.

Thanks for the explaination on tx processing. My question is the requirement for IoT devices to perform PoW to send a transaction. Take an example of a simple temperature sensor requiring minimum power & computational power to operate. How can a device like this be part of the IOTA network because of the PoW requirement? OR, is it designed such that only devices with sufficient power & computational capabilities (to perform PoW) or or only IoT devices with JINN processors can be part of the IOTA network?

Another question: How do IoT devices connect to the network since there is no automatic peer discovery? Does a manufacturer/user of these IoT devices have to manually configure every device with specific neighbours?

How can a device like this be part of the IOTA network because of the PoW requirement?
Small devices just need to receive and broadcast a tx, the network spammers such as JINN or GPU-spammer will do their PoW for them. The computational power is therefore outsourced from small and smallest devices.

How do IoT devices connect to the network since there is no automatic peer discovery? Does a manufacturer/user of these IoT devices have to manually configure every device with specific neighbours?
a) Peer discovery was shut off because the network topology was suffering. For now, people in the tangle can either look for neighbors manually in our slackchannel under #nodesharing to run a full wallet or they can use the integrated light wallet, which is only connected to one node. A list of supplied nodes is here: http://iotasupport.com/lightwallet.shtml

b) Manufacturer most likely won’t need to look for single nodes for each and every device. Remember: the Jinn will be able to conduct thousands of tx a second so the solution will be somehow managed with that. I guess subtangles are part of the solution. But for this particular question, it would be your best option to ask one of our developers in our slackchannel. You can ask me (@limo) for help in slack. The invitation link for slack is under LINKS.

“Small devices just need to receive and broadcast a tx, the network spammers such as JINN or GPU-spammer will do their PoW for them. The computational power is therefore outsourced from small and smallest devices.”

Sounds good. That means the current software is not yet ready for this? – because currently, to send iotas require PoW, even when using light wallet.

That tangle will be connected to a central server in your house, from there all sensors are connected to this server. So I guess companies who want to provide this kind of service have to create this special clientside-software for sensors on their own so that the sensors can be part of a subtangle or so. But I’m just guessing here.
Right now the tangle and the software directly connected to it is beeing developed and tested. Services on top of that, like an e-car-wallet, or smart data applications need to be developed by the companies who collaborate with the IOTA foundation or companies who have the capabilities to deal with the code and its API etc.
The user-software is fully functioning, by the way, so people can send and receive iotas, they can also try to build proof of concepts with it. IOTA has a javascript, python and C library, furthermore a working sandbox-environment.
Needless to say, that core is improving the code and implementing new features all the time.

The problem with IOTA is that when the network is inactive the transactions have been reported to take up to 7 or even 10 hours and I don’t think machines would like that either which causes doubt that it can get off the ground without allowing optional transaction fees.

That’s common for distributed ledger technology. The IoT works in mesh-nets, many local clusters etc.
You neither need transaction fees nor big computational power.
The tangle is big enough to provide confirmed transaction in 3 minutes already, the IoT will be a totally different beast.
And we not even have JINN yet.
What exactly was the problem? 🙂

IOTA aims to be the currency of the Machine-to-Machine economy – but does that mean that it excludes the human-to-human transactions? If they really don’t cost anything, then why wouldn’t the crypto-society (and then society itself perhaps) adopt it as a main currency, overthrowing Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash and everything else?

AFAIK the developer held back 1% for his efforts. The term premine isn’t necessarily connected to mining, but to funds that are hold back before an ICO, or a distribution like in Byteballs case, so yes, there was premine and no, you’re right, there was and is no mining.

Hello Dinh,
the coordinator is necessary, in order to prevent 34% attacks on the network in its infancy, meaning that with more time and more fullnodes, the number of fullnodes and the natural conditions against such an attack are given, so that the coordinator can be shut off and be replaced by MCRW algorithm for a random tip-selection.
Byteball is not true DAG, instead it’s not endlessly scalable, it also has transaction fees and so called witnesses, servers that are vital for the confirmation. Byteball is also centralized in a certain way.
The coordinator has nothing to do with “decentralization” it’s just a protection.
IOTA is therefore not centralized, but decentralized. When MRCW is activated, IOTA is truly distributed and can act as the protocol/settlement layer in a mesh-net of the global IoT.

In the paper it sounds nice, IOTA seems to be the better one but in practice IOTA transaction confirmations take ages, they are not guaranteed at all as they are free, imagine you pay with it and have to wait hours and nothing occurs… It is NOT usable.
The best currency is the one that confirms, always and fast (less than a minute ideally)

some lightnode providers act as a heavy bottleneck. If you’d run a fullnode, like recommended, you would experience the beauty of that system, because a normal transaction is confirmed in 2 minutes or less.

I don’t see how IOTA transactions can be near instant when PoW must be done prior to the transaction confirmation ( and that takes a while, at least every time I’ve used the wallet it does). I see comments of hours, days on-line. In my experience it is about 20sec to 15 mins. for the wallet to update the balance. Also, confirmation is not deterministic ( it is probabilistic ) so when is it actually confirmed?? You might decide that when it is 85% probable it is good enough, but then a bit later it is reversed. Correct?

“Byteball in fact, can do everything IOTA can do, except functioning as the backbone of the Internet of Things because transactions-fees would be counterproductive.”
Is that really true and logical. Electricity and PoW are an expense; worse they are a largely unpredictable and difficult to measure expense leaking out of the network. The ByteBall fee is predictable and in direct correlation to the payload. Yes it has electricity expenses, but since there is no PoW those are relatively small and can be somewhat reduced.

@TechCrunch Would love that for the cryptospace, together with a standard they had to accept like using primary sources, commentaries have to be marked as such and conflicts of interests should be marked at the beginning of an article. Crypto desperately needs a standard. #iota #btc #eth